


the rose-colored gospel

by negativecosine



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Dream Bubbles, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-12
Updated: 2015-01-12
Packaged: 2018-03-07 06:33:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,450
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3164831
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/negativecosine/pseuds/negativecosine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After she dies, Rose does much what she did when she lived- read too much, write for no audience, and initiate inadvisable strifes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the rose-colored gospel

**Author's Note:**

  * For [gemini28](https://archiveofourown.org/users/gemini28/gifts).



Being dead was a good vacation for the first hundred years, as best you could keep track. You got a lot of reading done- there were dreambubbles that were libraries of worlds that had never existed, and you hoarded books every time one of them slid through your own filmy sphere. After a few dozen of these (among the hundreds of bubbles), you'd noticed the same few languages cropping up again and again- you got mostly English, Alternian, some sort of third species' that definitely wasn't human or Alternian, you got enormous amounts of French and German literature, a lot of Japanese, and for some reason you ran into a bubble that was exclusively what looked like Dr. Suess books translated into Icelandic. You saved _Fox in Socks_ from that one, because it is an enormous railed transport device catastrophe of syllables and you love it. 

You don't run into the kinds of bubbles you want to run into. You want to run into other Roses, or some Roxies, and you almost never do, and the doomed ones that you do see are so far astray from the Alpha timeline that they're like totally different people. You meet a Rose who was born into your world but she's this stocky, bulked-out little boxer with cropped hair and a huge scar across half her face. She's wearing sweatpants and says the Batterwitch didn't make it quite as far as yours did, but that the Alternian rebels accidentally blew up Earth in their civil war anyways. She eyes your matte lipstick and your seamed stockings a little oddly, but lets you paint her nails and make her an imaginary pot of tea, and gives you a crooked smile when her bubble slides out of range of yours. 

You also don't run into as many Daves as you expected. You run into a lot of Other Daves, the little ones, dead Daves, and dead Daves will always be the first to assure you that they are the enemy. They'll also be the first to call you a milf and demand a jelly sandwich on wonderbread and applejuice before they go, all those dead Daves, and about half the time you indulge them. They're so young, and it makes you really angry and snappish at them when they do things like take off their glasses to show you blank white eyes, or show you their slit throats or their death-memory-loops of getting boiled alive and eaten. Those Daves usually don't get sandwiches, they get barked at or ignored. One of them, one of the oldest dead Daves you met, made the bubble play his gruesome demise so vividly that you nearly attacked him, nearly broke down and flung your arms around his neck and tried to hug him or strangle him or glass him with your martini or some horrible messy combination of any of those things. He looked nearly sixteen, sort of worn thin and papery, not like the fresher, plumper, redder Daves that died earlier on in the Game when that Dave was making more mistakes. That was a Dave who knew what he was doing when he doomed himself. 

So you read a lot, between bubbles, and you write a lot. Some of your bubbles visitors ask you who you're writing for, since no one can really read it- some of the Janes (who sometimes try to hug you) or Dirks (who mostly refuse to talk to you) or Jades (half cute, half scary) or Johns (weirdly opaque) ask you stuff like that, if they stick around long enough.They ask if they can read it—that’s usually the more tractable Dirks, and nearly every single Jade you’ve ever met—or they ask if you’ll try to publish it somehow—that’s usually John, for some reason. Every single Jade loves every bit of your writing that she reads, and the Dirks are incredibly shrewd, nimble critics when they deign to read anything. John says things like “Huh” and Jane and Jake both say “Ooh” a lot, though only one Jake has ever asked to read your writing. That one did seem to be attempting to flirt with you, and was a little taken aback when you actually handed him an enormous hand-bound tome with your looping violet script filling out a good two-thirds of the pages. 

You never do meet a Roxy, at least, which means you must have done a few things right. If she’s hidden, even from you, she’s safe— _even from you_ , you think wryly to yourself sometimes, but those are bad nights. 

You don’t write about wizards very much anymore. The drive to do so was blasted when the Earth was, and it took the equivalent of a good few decades before you were even willing to think a pen into existence to try again. For (the equivalent of) at least several years all you did was record the doings and changes of your own bubble—the memories it would play, how they felt, how they melted into each other, how time seemed to warp and bend, how the smell of soap could change slightly. You have no way of knowing whether the book in which you logged the bubble was itself not changed as the bubble changed as your mind changed, and when you follow that looping string of thought the bubble follows you into it, so that the edges of what should be your comfortable modern open-plan loft fades into a bright staticky void that hurts your eyes, so dark it burns to look at. 

You see things you shouldn't. You try to trust that what you write stays written down. 

Sometimes there are trolls in the bubbles. You attacked the first dozen or so, and some of them squeaked and hid, and some of them responded in kind, but you couldn't satisfactorily double-die from a fight within the bubbles, so it would be a sick sort of timed cage match, you and some anonymous gray monster ripping at each other with telekinetics or wands or nails and teeth until such time as the bubbles drifted back apart and the unreality reformed itself around you. You got better at fighting within the bubbles after a while- you learned that your memories were a weapon, and that you could dream up the scorching Earth sun from your twenty-year old road-trip across Death Valley and that it made trolls hiss and smoke from the little gills in their sides. You learned that you could dream up the nightmares you were having about the Batterwitch all through your teens, and she would happily rend limbs from a screaming lowblood before she would notice a dark-eyed alien in the shadowed corner. You learned that not a lot of trolls went into death ready to keep fighting. 

You wrote those things down, too, after a few of them. You started keeping track of other bubbles besides your own- the humans you came across (only those seven humans, counting yourself, never another single soul, and wasn't that hollow and terrifying in its own way, though you could See the other humans who had died and were real, you were almost certain, they were real and you did not dream them) and the trolls. Those began to repeat, too, so you began to ask names before you fought them. You met hundreds and hundreds of a ram-horned troll named Aradia who was enormous and blunt-clawed and who laughed when she snapped your arm. Sometimes she had wings, but mostly she didn't. She was the only one of her caste you ever met, but there were other ones close to her in the blood-tiers, sort of browns and oranges and yellows, warm hues. The psionic one, you tended to meet him in twos, he never shut up when he was fighting you, nor did he lift a finger, let all his sparkling powers do the work, which is when you started throwing aside the Thorns and just kicking him in the shins. The bull-horned one, sometimes he ran away, wouldn't fight you at all, and you let him. Sometimes he had wings, too, unless that wasn't him- he seemed different. There were sea-trolls, with whom you were merciless, and there were mutants, whom you pretended not to notice. You got only seven names, including Aradia- there was Karkat, Nepeta who took your ear clean off once, Meenah whom you fought for what felt like a week solid, until both of you were barely able to pick yourselves up off the uncertain ground and the bubble had gone all dark and transparent, Mituna, Cronus, Tavros, and Vriska. 

You wrote a lot about Vriska. She had talked nonstop, had apparently sort of gotten bored of fighting halfway through and turned it into some sort of odd fencing match, though her strife specibus looked a lot like magic and it was hard to keep a duel going when she was trying to tell you about her ex-girlfriends or something. You'd been through what may have been the same Vriska twice, which was exceedingly rare-- something told you that was actually the alpha timeline's Vriska, despite her godawful haircut, and you'd stopped fighting trolls out of course by the second time she came through. You didn't exactly insist that she read and critique your latest pointless novel, either, but it was more surreal than the usual surreality to consider the absolute unlikelihood of a repeat. She also insisted on giving you her Trollian handle, and which required first insisting on installing Trollian on your husktop, and clicking through far too many of your tabs without permission. 

She almost never actually trolled you on it, but it made the existential nonsense quite a bit more nonsensical to see that she actually did go on- and offline even after her bubble drifted away from yours again. You got the occasional irritating missive with a lot of octets, and not a lot of helpful news from outside your bubble. You don't know what you expected, exactly. 

The eight troll whose name you learn is Porrim. 

This is well past when you've stopped fighting them. This is well past when you've sat down with a few of them (a stray Karkat who got eaten by some sort of enormous frog, and a Cronus whom you nearly just try to eject bodily from your bubble into the waiting arms of the horrorterrors) and figured out the Alternia/Beforus thing, so you establish first that this is Alternian Porrim. You've also learned a lot about troll biology, and are chagrined and not a little horrified to discover that most of the trolls you've been fighting were children or adolescents. This Porrim is an adult troll, built more like the Batterwitch than any other troll you've met up close. She towers a good half your height over you, and her carapace is a slick iridescent black that makes her teeth shine pearl-white in contrast. She's not the first one of her caste that you've met, but the younger jadeblood pulled a fucking chainsaw on you, so you didn't exactly exchange Trollian handles that time. 

This time, Porrim introduces herself rather politely for an Alternian troll, and asks what sort of human you are meant to be. 

You are not accustomed to answering questions about what you are. Answering questions about what you do- why do you write, why do you read, why do you See when there's nothing to fucking look at?- those are easier by now. But what are you? 

"I am Rose Lalonde," you tell her, "And I am a mother." 

"Ah," she says, and her low chirring voice is so much more alien than the little tween trolls you've been dealing with, "Me too," and makes herself completely at home on your sofa without further invitation. 

You sort of wish you could make tea or coffee or fix her a drink or something, for something to do with her hands, but the bubble does it for you, because you're obsessively remembering the lavish Christmas tea spread in your adoptive aunt's dining room when you were young. The dining room, the biscuits and tea cakes and fruit cakes and pie and silver coffee pot and slim candles and heavy linen napkins are all there because you can't stop thinking about what an excellent hostess your aunt was, and what a hostess you are not. You have no idea what to do when you're not trying to either kill your guests or pump them for information. 

For lack of a better option, you sit down across the long table from her. It is empty but for the two of you, and stretches out a little farther on either side, in the way that dream-geometry gets a little non-Euclidean. She's still massive, even sitting, but you're closer to being eye to eye with her, and you can see the elaborate way her robes are pinned, the shimmer and shift of the fabric. You wonder what kind of fabric that is- for recording this later, which you will of course need to do. 

"I was under the impression that motherhood was a rather centralized occupation for trolls," you say finally, when you become uncomfortably aware that you are just sitting at this food-laden table, staring silently at Porrim's... thorax. Chest-area. It's eye-level for you. You get back to looking at her face. Her eyes are green like a beetle's wing. 

"Yes, well," Porrim says. "My son found me under rather unusual circumstances. He was a bit of a- what did the last human say? A free spirit. That was a nice word, I liked that. My son was a free spirit." 

Besides breaking figurative bread with an adult troll (she is delicately serving herself the rhubarb pie), the other profoundly novel thing is hearing familiar terms like that from one. The closest thing you can recall is Vriska's continuous references to her sister, whom you gathered was not an actual sibling genetically but more a sort of ally. It seemed a touchy subject, and not one often repeated among the younger trolls you had spoken with. 

"Forgive me," you say finally, after a great deal of internal deliberation. Touchy subjects with trolls tend to lead in a very particular direction, and now that you've resolved to stop fighting- well, and now that you've found a fight you absolutely cannot win- it pays to choose your words carefully. "But my understanding of your planet's culture is that... a free spirit, as you say, would not be treated very nicely." 

"You are asking if he was culled," she says bluntly. "This dessert is very good, what is this animal in the pastry?" 

"Rhubarb is a root vegetable," you say, soft and careful, resting a hand on your butter-knife. Just in case. 

"He was, of course. He was a mutant, and an insurrectionist and a revolutionary and aquadrancial and much more besides. I am proud of him for each of those things." She takes another bite of the pie. Rhubarb on her teeth looks rather gruesome, now that you are on your guard. "It was a very public culling, after which a lot of things happened that I do not care to recall, or we will find ourselves somewhere unpleasant in here. What about your grub?" 

It takes you a moment. You've taken your hand off the butterknife and laid both hands in your lap, feeling tiny and guilty and still incredibly alert. "I never met my grub," you say. She pauses in her pie consumption. 

"Forgive me," she echoes back to you, "But my understanding of your planet's culture was that motherhood entails at least an initial meeting, does it not?" 

"Ectobiological... time... shenanigans," you say weakly. You really want a slice of that pie, more and more, the more you look at her half-eaten slice in front of her. "Yes, we normally carry our live young to term or adopt them through some social contract or another, but mine will come hundreds of years after my demise. She may have begun already. I don't know. I Saw her, and I had to... do what I could to ready things for her, knowing I would never be able to care for her myself." 

You stop. You glance up at Porrim- yes, that is her name, you remind yourself, you will need to remember it for your book, later. "I do not envy you," she says, a forkful of pie stalled halfway between plate and mouth. 

"Nor I you," you tell her, honestly. It is everything you can do not to ruin your mascara in this moment, but you manage to blink the stinging away, and use the brief pause to finally serve yourself your own slice of pie. You don't pick up your fork yet. 

"Be careful with your thoughts," she says, rather abruptly, and it occurs to you to look around. The dining table with the Christmas tea is still here, but around it the dining room has dissolved into a drizzly northwestern forest. "This flora is unfamiliar, this memory is yours. Do not take us anywhere dangerous." 

Even as she says it, the forest is already melting back into cold, flat cement. It's the camp, when they caught you the first time. There are no men with guns this time, but there were dogs. You can hear them. "Take us," you tell her urgently. The pie and most of the table setting has disappeared, and the table is already beginning to fade. "I can't take us out of this one, you need to-" 

With a snap, you are under alien moonlight with dry desert wind on your face. You are both standing, now, facing each other, because the table and the food and the furniture are all gone. 

"Ah," she says. 

"Are we in danger?" you feel the need to ask, because prison camp to Alternian desert doesn't exactly fill you with hope for the future of your safety and comfort. 

"I am going to feel a lot of troll emotions now," Porrim says, and sweeps off through the pink-washed sand. It's got to be all quartz sand, you note absently, with the way it glitters rosily under the bigger of the two moons. You follow Porrim, who can move awfully fast in a floor-length robe in the sand, and you do your best to look like you're not jogging to keep up. You suspect you're about to be taken on a tour down Memory Lane, which is indeed the only lane it is possible to be taken on a tour down, in the bubbles, but everything feels weightily significant under the thick syrupy moonlight, and Porrim is quite deliberately not looking at you, but nor is she letting you fall behind. 

She leads you to a cliffside, sheer granite-like formation, except that it is far more purple and magenta. Some part of you wonders if this is in fact a solid amethyst mountain, and if it is possible for anything to be more awesome than that. It is: there is a cave in the cliff, and there is bioluminescent flora in the cave, and the whole thing is lit up and glittering in brilliant shades of lavender and pink that throw little shards of light onto the two of you.   
Deep in the cave, there is a bundle of rags. 

"We stayed here for two lunar perigrees," she tells you, when she has toed through the bundle to reveal that they are quite empty. "When he was quite young, before his second moult, but he was already preaching on the mountain, and the lowbloods from the badlands would come to hear him say that they did not deserve to die for the way they were hatched." 

You have been standing a few paces back. You don't know how long she has been grieving, but it seems like she started the same way you did: before you even lost them. You close the distance, careful to approach her from the side so she can see you coming, and reach out to fold your tiny human hand into her massive clawed one. She folds her claws around your fingers gently, carefully bends down to pick up the rag from the ground with her other hand. She wraps the cloth around your wrist- it feels like it was once rough, but got worn soft with age. 

"Forgive me," you say, breathing as quiet and careful as you can, so you don't disturb the fragile peace, "but my planet's culture values this kind of thing. Would you mind if we go somewhere where I can write this down?"


End file.
